Kicaj Blog

Vagrantfile and provisioning part 2

Welcome to the second blog post about Vagrant. If you have not read it please do because in this part we will pick up where we left off the last time and finish with fully configured PHP, Apache and MySQL development environment.

Video tutorial

Vagrantfile

When using the default Vagrantfile that we created previously a VM gets only 512MB of RAM, one network interface and one shared folder. It’s not bad but we want to customize it to better suit our needs.

For example, the name of the VM doesn’t mean anything. It might be nothing but if you work with few projects and have many VMs it’s convenient to have them named in some meaningful way.

So to change it lets open the Vagrantfile we created previously and scroll to the Provider-specialfic configuration section:

# Provider-specific configuration so you can fine-tune various
# backing providers for Vagrant. These expose provider-specific options.
# Example for VirtualBox:
#
# config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
# # Display the VirtualBox GUI when booting the machine
# vb.gui = true
#
# # Customize the amount of memory on the VM:
# vb.memory = "1024"
# end
#
# View the documentation for the provider you are using for more
# information on available options.

Provider specific configuration section is where you configure VirtualBox specific details for the VM. Let’s remove comments and edit some of the configuration options.

It should look like this:

# Provider-specific configuration so you can fine-tune various
# backing providers for Vagrant. These expose provider-specific options.
# Example for VirtualBox:
#
config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
# Display the VirtualBox GUI when booting the machine
vb.gui = false
# Set the name for the VM
vb.name = "MyProject"
# Customize the amount of memory on the VM:
vb.memory = "1024"
end
#
# View the documentation for the provider you are using for more
# information on available options.

We instructed the VirtualBox that our VM:

is not using GUI,

should be named “MyProject”,

and have at least 1024MB of RAM.

Now lets change the network configuration for the VM. By default it’s configured in a way that can be accessed only through port forwarding. To change the way network is configured scroll to network configuration section:

private_network – which will make the VM accessible only by the host OS

and public_network – which will make the VM appear as additional device on the network the host OS is connected to. For this tutorial we will use the private_network with IP address set the same way as in the example. So remove the comment from line where the private_network is.

The last thing we want to change is the guest OS hostname. Right now it’s something like this:

vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-wily-64:~$

It’s also not very meaningful.

To change it, scroll up Vagrantfile to where config.vm.box line is and add the following line below it:

config.vm.hostname = "guest"

While we are there we will also uncomment the line:

config.vm.box_check_update = false

Which will make starting the VM a bit faster because Vagrant won’t check if the box we are using has updates.

Those are all the changes we want to do for now. Save and close the Vagrantfile.

Because the VM is already running to see our changes we must reload the VM with:

$ vagrant reload

Which will halt the VM and then start it up again.

After stating the VM you should see the the changes in the startup log and VirtualBox GUI.

Provisioning

OK we have the VM but what about the PHP, Apache and MySQL?

We could install all of them with apt-get install but then VM would have to be configured by hand each time it’s started for the first time by us or some other developer for that matter. This is not what we want.

We want VM to have an ability to setup our development environment with one simple command.

This is what provisioning is for.

Provisioning is basically a script or series of scripts Vagrant calls as root user when the VM starts for the first time. You can configure what script to run in Vagrantfile with config.vm.provision configuration option like this:

config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "provision.sh"

Add it just before the final end keyword and save the file.

Now we have to create the file in the same directory where Vagrantfile is. The path to provision.sh file is relative to it.

Create the file with contents like this:

#!/bin/bash
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Then make it executable with:

$ chmod +x provision.sh

That’s it. Now every time you start this VM for the first time it will run this script.

But if you try to issue:

$ vagrant halt
$ vagrant up

The script will not run. This is because it’s not the first time the VM was started. To make sure script has been executed do:

$ vagrant destroy
$ vagrant up

or

$ vagrant halt
$ vagrant up --provision

Setting up the environment.

Now you know enough about Vagrant and Vagrantfile to create your own development environments that your projects require. But to get you started I created for you a bootstrap project on Github.

I won’t be going into the details how the provisioning scripts were created but I’ll show you enough to get you started creating your own scripts.

First we have to clone the git repository. To do that go to my repository on GitHub and copy the URL for the repository.

The repository has Vagrantfile which is very similar to what we created in this tutorial and multiple provisioning scripts.

The script that interests you the most is provision/config.sh this is where you can decide how the development environment should be configured. All the scripts have extensive comments to help you learn how to do it yourself.

For more information please read README.md file.

That’s it! Now you should be able to create development environments for your projects and share the “recipe” of how to make it with other developers.